Suggested focal areas within the general blind spots
- Socio-environmental effects (such as telecoupling) from unaccounted economic flows
- Context: While trade is now routinely seen as an economic activity that telecouples distant socio-environmental systems other, often unaccounted for, economic flows may be just as important telecouping agents - e.g. migrant remittances, illicit drugs, arms and wildlife trade.
- Definition: Unaccounted flows are defined as flows that are either illicit (flying under the radar) or often disregarded in sustainability science or (macro)economics.
- Cases:
- Migration and remittance flows
- Remittances and institutional innovation and online banking, e.g. micro loans
- Size of flow:
Migration
- Between 1965 and 2010, the fraction of people living outside their countries of birth increased from 2.2% to 3.1% of world population (Dean Yang presentation 2015)
- Globally, 247 million migrants in 2013 (and is expected to surpass 250 million in 2015) (Dilip Ratha, World Bank)
- Gallup World Poll: more than 40%of adults in the poorest quartile of countries “would like to move permanently to another country” if they had the opportunity. (Dean Yang presentation 2015)
Remittances
- 413 billion US$ in remittances (compared to 135 of development aid)
- Migrants’ remittances to developing countries are estimated to have reached $436 billion in 2014, a 4.4 % increase over 2013
- In 2015, however, the growth of remittance flows to developing countries is expected to moderate sharply to 0.9 percent to $440 billion
- Significance: International human migration is increasing (in absolute terms) and is creating new links between distant countries, for example via migrant remittances to their home countries. Since the beginning of the 1990’s , migrant remittances have surpassed other flows such as official development aid (ODA). But, what are the effect of these new flows in the origin and destination countries? What are the socioecological implications for sustainability in countries like Tajikistan or Somalia, in which remittances account for over 30% of GDP?
- In many cases a blind spot exists in that we do not have a good sense of the indirect impact of these international financial flows on environmental sustainability through their more direct effects on the development trajectory in the recipient country.
- Key references:
- Telecoupling effects: ???nothing on environment???
- Data paper: Abel, Sander - 2014 - Science (New York, N.Y.) - Quantifying global international migration flows
- Drug trade (Daniel)
- Arms trade (Peter)
- Illegal wildlife trade
- Size of flow: “The illegal animal trade has reached epic proportions in recent years. Illegal animal trafficking is the third largest illegal business in the world, closely following the drug and weapon trade. It is a twenty billion dollar international business that has practically doubled over the last fifteen years (Dener, 2006)”[1]
- Significance: A bright spot example of how successful local conservation requires measurement of illegal economic activity and targeted educational/policy action in remote areas far away from the wildlife populations of conservation concern.
- Key references:
- Patel et al (2015) Quantitative methods of identifying the key nodes in the illegal wildlife trade network (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/06/09/1500862112.abstract)
- “We take a more analytical approach to identify the key countries involved in the illegal wildlife trade network by using a new database of illegal wildlife trade reports, HealthMap Wildlife Trade, to identify (i) the key exporter, intermediary, and importer countries and (ii) the countries where enforcement activities and educational campaigns might most effectively disrupt the networks. Identifying these key countries can provide useful information on how to allocate resources to combat the illegal trade in wildlife, a major focus for conservation and public health agendas.”
- Convenion in Internationl Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) http://trade.cites.org/
- Data used by Patel et al (2015) http://www.healthmap.org/wildlifetrade/
- Socio-environmental effects of financial investor behavior and financial innovation
- Cases:
- Role of index investors in the food price spike in 2008/2009, 2011/2012 and contribution to the Arab uprisings (Peter)
- Empirical econometric evidence suggesting investors contributed to driving price increases
- Socio-environmental effects of "keystone"" economic actors in the global network of corporations
- Marine keystone actors (Peter)
- Österblom et al. - 2015 - Plos One - Transnational Corporations as ‘Keystone Actors’ in Marine Ecosystems
- Terrestrial
- Daniel: check work done previously for agricultural landscapes group: key actors in control of main agricultural inputs
- Determinants of fertilizer prizes and environmental consequences (Peter)
- Socio-environmental effects of sovereign defaults / restructuring
- Still have to find clear cases here - EU crisis is one example where suicides go up and well-being worsens while investment in e.g. shale gas goes up.
- Context: How does global financial volatility/crashes affect (socio-)environmental dynamics nationally through national economic reforms or defaults (and indirectly, through different economic activities people have to resort to in face of the crisis, which may be less sustainable)
- Cases:
- Soviet Union and fisheries dynamics (Osterblom and Folke)
- Financial innovation as a doubled edged sword - regulatory escape or innovating for sustainability (Peter)
- Suggested cases:
- Small scale financial instruments (micro-finance) - e.g. farmer insurance of crops
- Effect of small scale regulatory changes - e.g. World Bank reformed guidelines
- New instruments with missing standards - e.g. Green Bonds market
- The green democratic transition in the anthropocene - effects of inequality and concentration of wealth (Peter)
- Cases:
- Global context: Stalled global environmental negotiations and inequality - e.g. climate negotiations
- National:
- Voting behaviour of elected representatives in economies with high inequality
- Regulators dilemma and regulatory capture in environmental regulation & enforcement - e.g. offshore drilling, wildlife protection act and others
- Media ownership and coverage of the sustainability transition - are populations more aware about the transition in countries with more diverse media ownership?
- Local: Inequality and mental health and well-being
- Can poor mental health and well-being in e.g. competitive environments undermine a green transition? Is it a precondition for the green transition?
- Cases: Whitehall I and II studies, public health and inequality research, biodiversity decline and inequality research
- Synergies between the blind spots
- The significance of these three blind spots also comes from the feedbacks between each other. I think this should be highlighted more. One generic example we speculated about was something like: how the development of financial instrument X facilitates a Y illicit transnational economic flow, and gives room for side-stepping democratically developed environmental regulations, with particularly bad consequences for marginalized people.